When my father was down for Thanksgiving, we discussed Ronald Reagan's divorce, and why nobody made much of a deal about it. I wondered if it was because the divorce was not the fault of Reagan but of his first wife. Such seems to be the case, from what I read about Jane Wyman's total of four failed marriages and five divorces (she remarried one man for a few extra years).

Wyman had become inconsolable and reclusive. She threw herself into her work and during the filming of Johnny Belinda, Wyman and Lew Ayres, despite not liking each other initially, became very close, while Reagan was embroiled in the Screen Actors Guild. Wyman announced it was over, letting it be known that Reagan was patronizing and indifferent to her career efforts. The divorce was finalised in 1949 and soon Wyman began seeing Lew Ayres again.

...

When Wyman was contracted out to Columbia to work on Let's Do It Again, she met Freddie Karger, a Columbia pianist and composer, and the couple wed in Santa Barbara in 1952. Trouble began shortly after with Wyman's salary and social status being above Karger's, which made him feel inferior. Separations and reconciliatons followed all through 1953 and 1954 in bewildering tandem, and finally Wyman threw in the towel with a divorce in 1954, where Wyman said in the suit that Karger had a fierce temper and threatened her by throwing furniture around. Devastated and embarassed at her fourth marital failure, Wyman began taking instruction in the Roman Catholic faith after being influenced by close friend Loretta Young. Seven years after Wyman's divorce to Karger, she remarried him in 1961, buoyed by his conversion to Catholicism. The marriage lasted four years but again broke up due to career incompatibilities.

Wyman was never to remarry. "I guess I just don't have a talent for it," she told friends after the second Karger divorce. "Some women just aren't the marrying kind - or anyway, not the permanently marrying kind, and I'm one of them."

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